Apocalypse Meow vs Passwordless

Apocalypse Meow’s main focus is addressing WordPress security issues related to user accounts and logins. This includes things like: Brute-force login-in protection; Customizable password strength requirements; XML-RPC access controls; Account access alerts; Searchable access logs (including failed login attempts and temporary bans); User enumeration prevention; Registration SPAM protection; Miscellaneous Core and template options to make targeted hacks more difficult; Anonymize/scrub leaky remote request headers; Security is an admittedly technical subject, but Apocalypse Meow strives to help educate “normal” users about the nature of common web attacks, mitigation techniques, etc. Every option contains detailed explanations and links to external resources with additional information. Knowledge is power! Requirements Due to the advanced nature of some of the plugin features, there are a few additional server requirements beyond what WordPress itself requires: WordPress 4.4+. PHP 7.4 or later. PHP extensions: (bcmath or gmp), date, filter, json, pcre. CREATE and DROP MySQL grants. Single-site Installs (i.e. Multi-Site is not supported). Please note: it is not safe to run WordPress atop a version of PHP that has reached its End of Life. Future releases of this plugin might, out of necessity, drop support for old, unmaintained versions of PHP. To ensure you continue to receive plugin updates, bug fixes, and new features, just make sure PHP is kept up-to-date. 🙂 Log Monitoring Some robots are so dumb they’ll continue trying to submit credentials even after the login form is replaced, wasting system resources and clogging up the log-in history table. One way to mitigate this is to use a server-side log-monitoring program like Fail2Ban or OSSEC to ban users via the firewall. Apocalypse Meow produces a 403 error when a banned user requests the login form. Your log-monitoring rule should therefore look for repeated 403 responses to wp-login.php. Additionally, some robots are unable to follow redirects; if your login form requires SSL, you should also ban repeated 301/302 responses to catch those fools. If you have enabled user enumeration protection with the die() option, requests for ?author=X will produce a 400 response code which can be similarly tracked. Privacy Policy When active, this plugin retains security logs of every sign-in attempt made to the CMS backend. This information — including the end user’s public IP address, username, and the status of his or her attempt — is used to help prevent unauthorized system access and maintain Quality of Service for all site visitors. This information resides fully on the hosting web site and is not shared with any third parties. Data retention is entirely up to the site operator, but by default old records are automatically removed after 90 days. Please note: Apocalypse Meow DOES NOT integrate with any WordPress GDPR “Personal Data” features. (Selective erasure of audit logs would undermine the security mechanisms provided by this plugin. Haha.)

I have created this plugin because it is of great use to me and I hope it will be of use to others but it might break things. Please use it with caution and at your own risk. If you find bugs please get in touch with me or better yet help fix it on GitHub. Login process Passwordless allows your site’s users to log in using only their email addresses. After submitting the login form with the email address filled in, the user will receive an email containing a login link which can only be used once. Clicking that link results in the user getting logged in for one year or until he logs out. Unused login links expire after one day. New users New users will have accounts created for them automatically when they try to log in for the first time. In this case their email will also act as the username. Their visible name will be set to ‘Annonymous’ but can obviously be changed on the profile page. Login page The plugin changes the login page URI to example.com/login from the default example.com/wp-login.php. If permalinks are disabled the login page will instead be example.com/?login. The page can be customized using some of the same filters and action hooks that the original login page used. If a total overhaul of the page is desired, placing a login.php template file in the currently active theme directory will override the plugin’s login page. Filters I have included some new filter hooks to make it easy to change important aspects of the plugin’s inner workings. passwordless_login_page applied to the login page URI. Filter function argument: string containing the login page URI. passwordless_pass_length applied to the length of the generated passwords/keys. Filter function argument: integer representing the number of characters. passwordless_key_expire applied to the number of seconds a login key is valid for. Filter function argument: integer number of seconds. passwordless_login_redirect applied to the URI where a user is sent after logging in. Filter function arguments: string URI, integer user id. passwordless_email_subject applied to the subject of the email that gets sent to users logging in. Filter function arguments: string email subject, string email address. passwordless_email_body applied to the body of the email that gets sent to users logging in. Filter function arguments: string email body, string email address.